ABSTRACT
This chapter explicitly charts how digital technology might facilitate communities to tell specific, nuanced, and authentic stories by and of their own community. The philosophy that drives these types of storytelling projects is a belief that having the opportunity to tell their own stories empowers individuals and communities, and that sustainable change occurs from within empowered communities. Nevertheless, stories do not exist in a vacuum and the purpose of many community storytelling or social research projects is to bring those stories into the public discourse and into a dialogue between the storytellers and audience. New immersive forms of storytelling such as virtual reality, augmented reality and locative-based storytelling might once again shift our perception of place and how to craft stories, and as of yet have not been significantly analysed in relation to their function in social change through storytelling. This chapter challenges the veracity of claims about the empathy creating potential of Virtual Reality technology.
Hollow is a participatory community project and interactive documentary that explores the social and economic devastation of rural towns in America through the story of McDowell County, West Virginia. It combines personal digital stories, photography, audio, interactive data, and grassroots mapping on a HTML5 website that was designed to explore the many stereotypes associated with the area, population loss, and future potential. In Hollow, the multiple methods deployed to create the environment in which the project is set are examples of not only the impact that attention to cultural, physical, and economic environment can have on non-fiction projects, but also how particular media and platforms can be used to best portray particular aspects of that world.
The chapter ends with a discussion of the Neo- learning project which is a collaboration between a First Nations community in Western Australia and Big h ART.
